How high can the Kyle & Jackie O rocket ship go?

BY Tim Burrowes

November 9, 2022 5:14

How high can the Kyle & Jackie O rocket ship go?

Welcome to a midweek edition of Unmade. Today: The biggest story inside the radio numbers.

In everything we do with Unmade, we attempt to dig a little deeper. Today’s email is no exception. Preparing the graphs that appears below involved selecting and analysing 120 separate data points, spanning nine years. That’s why today’s email is (much!) later than usual.

You can show your organisation’s support for independent journalism by signing up to Unmade as a paying member.

How Kyle & Jackie O smashed the radio record books

One of the reasons the Netflix show Drive To Survive is so compelling is because the Formula One documentary series pulls out individual rivalries to tell a series of seperate stories.

We’re taking that approach to yesterday’s radio ratings. Rather than covering all five metro markets and all battlegrounds, today we’re digging into just one story – the rise and rise of Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson – and how they helped KiisFM overturn 2GB for breakfast dominance in Sydney.

Yesterday’s milestone was to deliver Sydney’s biggest cumulative weekly audience of all time. According to GfK, an average of 818,000 people in Sydney tuned in to KiisFM between 5.30am and 9am for at least eight minutes at some point during the week.

The milestone had all the more impact because as well as hitting a record cumulative reach, the Kyle & Jackie O Show also overtook 2GB’s Ben Fordham for average listening share – the number of people estimated to be tuned in at any given moment, rather than across the whole week.

In general, the natural order of things – in Sydney and Melbourne anyway – is that an AM commercial talk station tops the overall listening share and over on FM, the music stations have a seperate battle amongst themselves.

In recent years that’s meant 2GB on top in Sydney, first with Alan Jones and then his successor Ben Fordham, while Kiis has been number one in the timeslot on FM, but behind 2GB overall. 3AW and Gold repeat the pattern in Melbourne.

Until yesterday, Kyle & Jackie O had overturned that order just once. Back in 2021, during the fourth survey of the year, the pair delivered an average audience of 128,000, overtaking Fordham who had dipped to a low of 109,000.

Eleven surveys later, they did it a second time in yesterday’s survey – averaging 124,000 to Fordham’s 123,000.

But much more extraordinary – and you need to see it on a graph to understand it – is the way that over the last year, the cumulative reach of the Kyle & Jackie O show has rocketed.

Just over a year ago, the Kyle & Jackie O Show dipped to its third lowest cume number since going on air, with a reach of “just” 483,000.

Yesterday’s 818,000 was a 69% improvement on that. Sometimes, you’d assume a jump is just a quirk of the survey, but the show’s cume has risen in eight out of the last nine surveys. That’s a trend.

Just look how their numbers have risen during 2022. It’s only been one survey since the show recorded reach numbers above 700,000 for the first time.

There were a couple of moments in the last decade when Jones, and then Fordham, came close to overtaking Kyle & Jackie O on reach. But now the battle doesn’t even look close.

As we’ve previously written, Sandilands has gone on air a couple of times to berate station management for failing to properly promote his show’s dominance in audience reach.

In general the trade press writes mostly about average audience, not reach. That’s because when the numbers are first released, the trade press isn’t initially given the cumulative reach numbers. They pop up on the Commercial Radio Australia website later in the day.

The Kyle & Jackie O Show was already a phenomenon. The numbers suggest that it has moved to the next level.

Unmade Index – fourth flaw

The Unmade Index fell for a fourth trading day in a row on Tuesday, with the index now sitting at 678.9 points – down by another 0.46% yesterday.

The index of locally listed media and marketing companies was dragged downwards by falls in the largest stock, Nine, and its majority owned real estate platform Domain.

However, most Unmade Index stocks rose yesterday, with Market Herald – owner of Gumtreee, Carsguide and Autotrader – soaring by more than 10%. Because TMH’s stocks are relatively closely held, trading in even a small number of shares can lead to volatility in the price. Yesterday saw around 280,000 options in TMH stock expire.